"Back in the 80s, the Commodore C-64 had an intelligent floppy drive, the 1541, i.e. an external unit that had its own CPU and everything. The C-64 would send commands to the drive which in turn would then execute them on its own, reading files, and such, then send the data to the C-64, all over a propriatory serial cable. The manual for the 1541 mentioned, besides the commands for reading and writing files, that one would read and write to its internal memory space. Even more exciting was that one could download 6502 code into the drive's memory and have it executed there. This got me hooked and I wanted to play with that - execute code on the drive. Of course, there was no documention on what code could be executed there, and which functions it could use." Very interesting. I'm most interested in how he describes others taking his work, and making it better. This would be impossible today, thanks to Microsoft, Apple, and other patent trolls.

Actually, the Atari was VERY robust with their cassette. It used FSK for the data, and was immune to almost any problem. I could pound my A410 on a wall during loading and it wouldn't miss a bit. The REALLY cool thing about the Atari cassette is they used a stereo cassette, where one channel carried data (in FSK format as mentioned), while the other channel was mixing with the computer audio. This allowed educational cassettes to talk to the user while loading data from the cassette.